Though I am no pop culture analyst, the death of Michael Jackson has been on my mind for the last week. Just a few scattered observations. Jackson isn’t the kind who inspires coherence anyway.
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Some commentators have tried to put Jackson up against the Beatles and Elvis. In terms of record sales, sure, but in terms of influence, please. I didn’t even own a Michael Jackson album until a few months ago, when Thriller went on sale on iTunes in celebration of its 25 anniversary. How often did Jackson’s songs turn up on the radio before he died? Not often. Compared to the Beatles, Elvis, even Queen, the Eagles, or James Taylor, Jackson wasn’t played much. “Beat It,” “Thriller,” “PYT,” and “Bad” seem somewhat dated. Not bad songs, but highly stylized and more flash than innovation.
I hate hearing that Michael Jackson broke new ground. Parliament broke new ground. Jimi Hendrix broke new ground. Marvin Gaye, Rick James, Diana Ross, Isaac Hayes, and of course James Brown, did everything Jackson ever did, and did it better. The most shameful part of this Michael Jackson idolatry is that it glosses over the people who really pioneered African-American music. The Jackson 5 had a couple of early hits. So what. Take the Jackson 5 out of Motown, and Motown is still Motown. Jackson a pioneer? Give me Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles any day.
Not that MJ was bad. Jackson’s got danceability going for him, but immortality? I don’t think so. I sincerely doubt our grandkids will know Jackson the way we know Dylan or Sinatra.
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Michael Jackson is well-remembered because he was the last of a breed. The New York Times reported he sold 750 million albums in his career. An astonishing number, and impossible in the days of the internet. Jackson kicked off his solo career shortly before CDs got big, and Thriller was one of the early albums that sold huge numbers in digital format. In the 1980s the music industry made a killing selling CDs, which were far more popular than the less durable LPs and cassette tapes. CDs were the medium pop music was looking for, and Jackson became a superstar just as CD sales took off.
Then the internet came and crushed the music industry. Thriller sold 28 million units in the U.S. alone, and there is no chance, in the age of piracy, that this will ever happen again. Thus Jackson arrived on the music scene just in time to benefit from an industry boom and flamed out as the industry collapsed. The biggest acts that were also Jackson’s contemporaries, U2, Madonna, the Police, Phil Collins, Mariah Carey, all were beneficiaries of the CD boom. WIth CD sales only a shadow of what they were even as recently as 1995, we won’t see another Michael Jackson.
Jackson was also the beneficiary of MTV’s success in the 1980s. The fragmentation of the cable TV market, and the dissolution of MTV from a true music channel to a trash reality TV station also precludes successors, though I feel this is a lesser issue than the influence of the internet.
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750 million albums worldwide. And died bankrupt, in a rented mansion. Who the hell rents mansions? If you can afford to rent a mansion, can’t you afford to buy a regular house? If he got a dollar in royalties for every record sold, he should easily be a billionaire. Instead, he died broke. I can’t in my wildest dreams imagine burning through a billion dollars, but Jackson did it. Did it by building a private Disneyland at his house and inviting children for sleepovers, even while he was being accused of child molestation. Maybe I can’t tell you for sure that he molested children, but I can tell you that a person who can’t stay away from children even while he is being investigated for improper conduct with a minor has a serious problem. The definition of compulsive-addictive behavior is when a person can’t stop doing something even when the consequence of continuing the behavior is personal destruction.
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I can’t think of a person who better fits Daniel Boorstin’s definition of a celebrity: “The celebrity is well known for his well-knownedness.”
In fact, Boorstin, an American historian who died in 2004 and so must have known about Jackson, has many quotes in his books that remind me of the self-crowned King of Pop.
Nothing is really real until it happens on television.
We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weakness, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.
The last quotation was the the most prescient. Michael Jackson is dead, and every channel on TV fills its hours with his face. Even when he can no longer deliver any services, he still sells.
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Time to stop. The more I write about Michael Jackson, the more irritated I get. He was more lucky than good: I can think of a hundred rock artists I’d rather listen to. Not that I won’t listen to Thriller or Off the Wall again, but when I think about the records I listened to back when Jackson was big — R.E.M., the Talking Heads, U2, the Clash, Squeeze — I’m sorry, but Michael Jackson does not fall in that class. I was in college when Jackson was big, and we dismissed him as Rock Lite. He is admired because he sold records, and he sold records because he was admired. He was good. He wasn’t great.
And what took him out at last? The jury is still out, but it appears to have been addiction. In my medical career I’ve seen addiction up close, many prosaic implosions that were miniatures of the supernova that was Michael Jackson. The only difference is that, with a billion dollars to prop him up, it took Jackson longer to crash to the ground.
We can think of this as tragic, but I don’t find it any more tragic than anybody else’s drug addicted death. And in some ways, his death is less dignified, because the media swarm is bound to obscure the realities of his death. We’ll hear every sad detail about his last days except the truth. That he killed himself with drugs the way any third-rate crackhead might have.
Just as those fabulous record sales obscured the bizarre appearance and behavior, the child molestation, the drug abuse, and even his stature as an artist, all that fame will obscure his death, which was dirty, predictable, and altogether common.
This country is wracked by drug addiction. Just as we close our eyes to every other aspect of this terrible scourge, we are going to ignore its realities when it claims one of our most famous citizens. How typical.